a social space away from the gaze of an oppressive white population.”2 Music was an important part of what Lawrence Levine called the “necessary space” that had existed between the slaves and their owners in the antebellum South. He described how the “sacred world of the black slave” — their religion, folklore beliefs, and music — prevented legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery. When this “necessary space” shifted to urban centers like Chattanooga or Birmingham and came under the same economic forces as the rest of the country, blues culture moved beyond self-definition and personal liberation to economic opportunity. It was, in Grace Elizabeth Hale’s words, “a dangerous dialectic,” one in which “slaves constructed masks of simplemindedness and sycophancy, loyalty and laziness to play to their owners’ fantasies while securing very material benefits.”3 The white-run entertainment business provided these material benefits as it mediated the space between the races, which depended on serving both black and white customers. That is why the first accounts of African American music in Birmingham come from white observers.
The blues figures large in the identity of black southerners. In her study of race, class, and regional identity in the postsegregated South, Zandria Robinson points to the centrality of this musical culture in defining what black is (“and what black ain’t”) in the South. She describes African Americans’ collective search for ancestral American history in which the South “stands in for a cognitively and geographically distant African homeland. Blues, soul, and gospel are the soundtrack.” Blackness, she argues, can be found in these “originary soundscapes.”4 In many ways this assessment of the power of blues music to create identity and encapsulate history is not much different from white blues enthusiasts who buy the commercial products of blues culture. Bessie Smith became the Empress of the Blues through the popularity of her recordings in white America, and by the 1920s the blues covered a very wide range of music. The bandleader Paul Whiteman competed with Bessie Smith as representing blues royalty, but his palm-court hotel music is as embarrassingly white as Bessie Smith’s music is excitingly black. There was no firm correlation at this time between racialized music and racialized bodies. Karl Hagstrom Miller describes a music industry at the turn of the century in which black and white performers “regularly employed racialized sounds,” but by the end of the 1920s listeners expected musicians to embody them, allowing African Americans to challenge the minstrelsy conventions that supported blackface.5
The story of Bessie Smith shows that the rise of the blues as a popular music provided opportunities for entrepreneurship, especially when it was co-opted by the white music business and popularized for broader consumption outside the segregated districts of the New South. Several students of Birmingham’s great music teacher, Fess Whatley, played in Smith’s band and got a chance to tour the country and make some good money. Bessie Smith played a large part in taking the blues out of its birthplace in the backstreets and byways of the black South into the mainstream entertainment of the industrialized West. She certainly benefited from it — her stage shows articulated the wealth and luxuries that fame brought her just like the current stars of hip-hop flaunt their wealth in their music and performances. I am certainly not arguing that these economic transactions between whites and blacks were fair and reasonable, but even the most criminal exploitation of blues musicians provided some small inducement to continue playing the system. Robert Toll, in his groundbreaking study of minstrelsy, stressed the mobility and opportunities of advancement to be found in blackface. However meager the returns of playing for the white man, they were preferable to the other outlets for employment and entrepreneurship. When Bessie Smith was making a career in regional vaudeville and appearing in the blacks-only theaters in Bessemer and Birmingham, she went back to working as a laundress in Birmingham during the times she was not on the music hall circuit.6
From the meager number of interviews with elderly African American musicians in Birmingham, and from a study of the literature and discographies, a pattern of entrepreneurship and opportunity emerged in Birmingham in which African American music during segregation was essentially a commercial endeavor played by professional musicians. In this conclusion I am on exactly the same page as Karl Hagstrom Miller. In his book Segregating Sound, he shows how southern music was compartmentalized first by the record companies and music business according to race, and then these divisions were reinforced by academics and listeners. This “logic of segregation” has become commonly accepted, but as he convincingly argues, this compartmentalization failed to reflect the music actually being played. Karl Hagstrom Miller starts his book with a quote about Robert Johnson from his traveling companion Johnny Shines: “He did anything he heard over the radio. Anything that he heard … It didn’t make him no difference what it was. If he liked it he did it.” Miller argues that the blues and country music sold as products of “modern primitives” in fact emerged from long engagement with pop and commercial music. He discovered that “the very idea of southern musical distinctiveness” came not from southern musicians playing in the South, but from the touring shows of vaudeville and minstrelsy and from southern migrants who moved to the North and Northeast.7
If we define blues music as a commercial endeavor that drew on a wide variety of sources and was successfully engaged with the music business, then its links to authenticity and black identity come into question. That it provided entrepreneurial opportunities for African Americans colors the content and tone of the memories of Birmingham’s black musicians. The first blues players who hustled from street corners in downtown Birmingham were content to play whatever their audience wanted. Birmingham’s first jazz musicians, schooled by the legendary Fess Whatley, played “society jobs” as often as they jammed for friends and neighbors — the former gigs were preferred because they paid better. Seeing their music as a profession, as their job, meant that African American musicians in all genres of the blues — from street corners to concert halls — had a particular take on segregation that did not dwell on its evils but rather on the opportunities it provided. It wasn’t that they ignored the racial injustices and violence going on around them; rather, they did not think it was worth it to stop carrying out their profession to confront these evils — they just kept on playing. As J. L. Lowe concluded about decades of performing big band jazz in the segregated South: “We did what we were supposed to do: we played.” Matters of blackness and whiteness took a back seat to considerations of green dollars; helping to define black identity and providing a record of racial injustice were all very well for subsequent generations of commentators and academics, but it did not pay the rent at a time when making a buck as a black man in Birmingham was very hard work.
Comparing the two sets of interviews — one from southern rockers and one from big band jazz musicians — provided some surprising similarities. Both groups of musicians put a high value on virtuosity and expressed a pride in their professionalism. Both provided plenty of stories about the decadence of the road; the only difference was that it was harder to extract all the interesting details from elderly African Americans. Both were convinced that Birmingham and its musicians had been undervalued in the history of American popular culture, and they wanted to see more credit being given to their city and its music.
The coming of rock ’n’ roll clearly provided more entrepreneurial opportunities for black musicians, despite claims that they were shortchanged when the music was stolen from them by the white entertainment industry, which indeed it was. But the black roots of rock music were appropriated just like the country ones, and there was no color bar to being cheated. In his excellent book on the music scene in Memphis, Robert Gordon sees rock ’n’ roll as the result of a collision of two musical cultures rather than a happy comingling of enlightened musicians, club owners, and record producers. Reading this book and enjoying the stories expertly recounted by Gordon reminded me of the same sort of stories told in our interviews with Birmingham’s musicians. Birmingham and Memphis are considered to be similar cities of the New South, and the same goes for their rock ’n’ roll experiences. They usually begin with first tentative explorations of black music by budding white musicians, starting with the radio and ending with the personal interactions by which all musicians learn their trade. Gordon assigns the telling quote “Everybody learned it from the yardman” to white guitarist Jim Dickinson, but I have heard the same thing from no end of Alabama
